Another standards grouphas lost touch with reality

"Broadband providers may have to ensure at least half of customers can receive advertised top line speeds, under a proposed crackdown on consumers being misled." HOW?

This would lead to, "sorry we can't connect you since you are out side our range", if you would get <49% of the top speed and they already have 50% on lower speeds. Do they really think these things through?

Until we get fibre to the premises for us ALL then this will still exist, especially in rural areas, where long lines are the norm.

Re: Another standards grouphas lost touch with reality

Rural areas have the satellite option, but at a cost - so maybe that should be subsidised where it would be cheaper to have a dish rather than run those fibre cables. There was or is a system in place where under certain circumstances the installation cost would be paid for by the government, but it still left the customer with a much higher monthly payment so they should look reducing that as well.

As for those promised line speeds, disingenuous does not even come near.

Re: Another standards grouphas lost touch with reality

I used to have satellite internet, complete with a cable run into a card in my pc. Real PITA it was.Upload was via landline, download was upto 2Mb if I remember correctly. I was on an unlimited download, until they phoned me and said I used too much! And they were increasing my cost, so I told them where to shove there satellite feed.

But the real issue is UP TO line speeds, I used to get 64Mb down, but with the increase in users here it is down to 56Mb, on ADSL I could just about get 6Mb (1+ mile from the exchange), but I knew I wouldn't get 8Mb at the time. We never got adsl2 (or maybe we did AFTER fibre). If I was on a longer line then it would be much lower, but the problem has always been the OLD copper lines and crappy connections between us and the exchange.

Re: Another standards grouphas lost touch with reality

Satellite television and satellite telephony is a bit different to satellite internet, especially considering that television is one-way and telephony is via multiple low earth orbit satellites...

The problem is the distances involved, between your dish and the satellite is about 40,000 miles, plus another 40,000 (give or take depending on the uplink location), and even with the signals travelling at the speed of light, the time between the packets being generated to arriving at their destination is quite large, so servers that require a quick response tend to drop the connection if the Ping isn't received fast enough, meaning limited access to the web.

Then of course there's clouds, no, not the online storage, the big floaty things in the sky, those can make it even more difficult to get a constant, reliable and fast signal because of lost packets and re-transmissions to send those packets again, slowing things down even more, sky makes it perfectly obvious when a light wisp of cloud crosses the path between the dish & satellites resulting in your channels conking out...

So, satellite broadband is one of those thing that is only useful where you actually need internet access, rather than want it, just don't expect it to be like having land-based broadband...

Re: Another standards grouphas lost touch with reality

Well I guess you are right, but having installed more sky dishes than I can shake a stick at not to mention a few for the internet, I encountered very few if any problems with customer complaining. Anyways, amazingly Open Reach with their 'Light Source' van have just turned up so even without that dish, things are looking up around here

As for those satellites, that signal I seem to recall has at source the power of a 40w bulb - so yet another amazing fact!

Re: Another standards grouphas lost touch with reality

As for those satellites, that signal I seem to recall has at source the power of a 40w bulb - so yet another amazing fact!

Shame it's not right...

Modern satellites can be quite powerful, pulling up the info on Astra 2D, retired in 2013, it has 1600 Watts of transmission power, a smidge more than 40 watts, though there is an analogy of a dish trying to see a satellite being equivalent of a human trying to see a 40 watt lightbulb at 40,000 miles way...

Re: Another standards grouphas lost touch with reality

Yeah I wouldn't listen to what a sky monkey says about satellite technologies, they're just trained to sling up an undersized dish to access hundreds of waste-of-airspace channels, not to know what actually goes on with the technology behind the stuff they're installing...

Back in the very, very early days, when "SKY" used capital letters for their name, and were a part-time single-channel operation on the Astra satellite in the 80s, then the power of the satellites was quite weak, but since then advances in technology, such as solar power, batteries, transmitters and digital multiplexing, have all made things a bit more advanced than a sky monkey would understand...

Re: Another standards grouphas lost touch with reality

Well I have to admit they recruited all sorts into their ranks but I'd trained as a TV engineer under the old C&G 222 RTEB courses. Five years day release, and now about as much use as chocolate teapot.... or an ashtray on a motorbike!

Sky were a terrible outfit to work for though so I went self employed soon after joining.

Re: Another standards grouphas lost touch with reality

It's easy to set up a dish anyway, drill a few holes in a wall, mount the dish up, use the Dishpointer app on a phone, point the dish, use a meter to tweak the signal strength to optimal, tighten up the bolts and everything's done...